


Only Sleep

by Ashling



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Nightmares, Trick or Treat: Trick, Triple Drabble, background John Shelby/Esme Shelby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-02 18:43:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21166250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling





	Only Sleep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Impala_Chick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Impala_Chick/gifts).

Esme isn’t so much a face as a long dress he bunches up around her hips, hair that froths along his cheek when he hides in it. Tommy is breathing in the soft scent at the curve of her neck when he finally realizes: this shouldn’t be happening. He was never supposed to see Esme again, ever. He stills; her hands keep traveling down his back.

“You too?” he says. It’s a defeat. Her hands grow cold. 

“You don’t know that,” she says.

But he does. He’s sure of it now. Opium is for the dead he wants to see; if there was anyone living, he could make it happen. Money like his makes for long arms.

“What happened?” he asks the curve of her jaw, but she’s drawing him closer now, as though that will help. It hurts instead. It’s worse that this feels so good.

“You think I can tell you?” Her voice is low and amused, which is so ungentle, so like her, that his chest seizes up. 

“All ghosts know how they died,” he says. “If they didn’t, they wouldn’t come back to me. There’d be no reason.”

(In his dreams, he understands German as well as English.) 

“I’m not after revenge.” She leans back, and now he can see that her eyes are black as a starless night. Frightening, but not hostile. She grips his jaw the way he once had gripped hers, though not so hard. “If I were, would this be the best way?”

He barely has the time to take in the question before her lips are on his, and he shouldn’t do this, but he does. They do. Long afterwards, eyes open in the dark, he finds the right answer: _Yes. It is. John’s ghost will come sooner or later, too._


End file.
